Link Banana

I’ve not read a book in a while and I’ve not missed it. But a good magazine article, those I have missed in their absense. This one, from 1991, is a good one. Take, for example, this excellent bit on weeks:

The week mocks the calendar and marches relentlessly and unbroken across time, paying no attention to the seasons. The British scholar F H. Colson, who in 1926 wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, described the week as an “intruder.” It is an intruder that arrived relatively late. The week emerged as the final feature of what became the Western calendar sometime in the second or third century A.D., in ancient Rome. But it can be glimpsed in different guises—not always seven days long, and not always continuous—in many earlier civilizations.

And a bit about the psychology of weekends:

We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it too.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The day that thing stopped going up seems like a decade ago. Oh, it was.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Though I’m not quite sure what makes these satellite images “abstract,” I do think they’re pretty neat. (Seperately, some of these pictures were linked to in this post.)

(via Andrew Sullivan)

I don’t really know how these pictures were made, but I’m pretty sure I like them.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

These pictures are pretty awesome. Perhaps best as a slideshow.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Further proving that I’m a sucker for cool presentation of data that serve no practical purpose: another in a recursive series about mapping the blogosphere. The coolest visuals are at the bottom, some analysis is here.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Andrew Sullivan recently pointed out this approachable article in The National Interest that compares the three major strains of contemporary American foreign policy theory — liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism, and realism — to characters in The Godfather. A sample:

Rather than ignoring this phenomenon like Tom or launching a frontal assault against it like Sonny, Michael sees it as a hidden opportunity. For Michael knows that if the family acts decisively, before the Tataglias and Barzinis have acquired a commanding margin of power, it can rearrange the existing institutional setup in ways that satisfy the new power centers but still serve vital Corleone interests. This he does through a combination of accommodation (dropping the family’s resistance to narcotics and granting the other families access to the Coreleones’ coveted New York political machinery) and institutional retrenchment (shifting the family business to Nevada and giving the other families a stake in the Corleones’ new moneymaker, Las Vegas gambling). In this way, Michael is able to give would-be rivals renewed incentives to bandwagon with, rather than balance against, the Corleone empire, while forcing them to deal with him on his own terms.

That title’s silly, but Arthur Shapiro’s Illusion Sciences blog is has some very cool stuff.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Two interesting stories.

• It seems, based on a terribly unsure-of-itself discussion here, that there are fewer Smiths in America than there used to be.
• Popular baby names in Kenya? Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Raila Odinga, and especially Kofi Annan.

(via Mr. Sullivan and Passport, respectively)

It’s interesting to see that the whole eastern half of the country, which looks like the worst culprit on the unadjusted version, looks pretty average on the per-capita version.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

I thought this was interesting:

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Iranian bloggers are mainly young democrats critical of the regime, we found a wide range of opinions representing religious conservative points of view as well as secular and reform-minded ones, and topics ranging from politics and human rights to poetry, religion, and pop culture.

Our research indicates that the Persian blogosphere is indeed a large discussion space of approximately 60,000 routinely updated blogs featuring a rich and varied mix of bloggers. Social network analysis reveals the Iranian blogosphere to be dominated by four major network formations, or poles, with identifiable sub-clusters of bloggers within those poles.

We label the poles as 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks. (View the full map.) The secular/reformist pole contains both expatriates and Iranians involved in a dialog about Iranian politics, among many other issues. The conservative/religious pole contains three distinct sub-clusters, two focused principally on religious issues and one on politics and current affairs.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The Economist compares the cost of living in cities around the world. I was rather surprised that neither London nor New York came out on top. As proof of my ignorance they say Norway’s Oslo has topped the list since 2005.

Also, this map of American cities and their singles sex ratio has been floating around. It appears to have originated on The Daily Dish. It appears to be related to Richard Florida’s recent Who’s Your City?

Speaking of criticism… John Freeman had some useful insight into why one might — and might not — want to read criticism at all.

In a way, pre-judgement is a necessary evil of criticism: there are far more books published than anyone could possibly read, busloads of awarded writers who aren’t actually worth reading. There’s no way to approach this forest gingerly. You need a buzz saw to clear some breathing room, gain a sightline, and criticism has to have enough teeth and ubiquitous availability to be that instrument.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

This video is very cool.

(via Andrew Sullivan, from whom I shameless stole the title.)

A blog about that idea only. I have to say that whoever this is is reading some interesting stuff. Hope they keep it up.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

In short, the “conventional wisdom” says that John McCain has won the Republican race, and nothing meaningful can be said about the Democratic race. Salon’s Walter Shapiro (in the title link) say as much, as does Slate’s John Dickerson. A growing number of people are claiming that Mr. Obama is actually going to come out ahead in the delegate count, but there’s not much consensus on that point yet.